Sinéad O’Connor Was Always Herself

The Irish musician Sinéad O’Connor died, on Wednesday, at the age of fifty-six, without having received adequate apologies from this society we inhabit, which is often fuelled by an obsession with doling out gleeful, prolonged punishment. Even before O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live,” in 1992, to protest sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, which prompted a group to run over her CDs with steamrollers, she’d received criticism for boycotting the Grammys, in 1991, after earning four nominations. (She won one award, for Best Alternative Music Performance, for her album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” which contained her smash-hit Prince cover “Nothing Compares 2 U.”) A year prior to that, as O’Connor explains in her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” before a concert in New Jersey, O’Connor was asked if she wanted the U.S. national anthem played before she took the stage, and she said no: “Anthems just have petrifyingly contagious associations with squareness unless they’re being played by Jimi Hendrix.” But the narrative became that O’Connor had refused to take the stage if the anthem was played. When word of that incident got out, Frank Sinatra threatened her with violence. Later, MC Hammer offered to buy her a plane ticket back to her native Ireland. Her greatest crime, underlying all of these defiant actions, was that she didn’t seem to be a gracious pop star, grateful for the sales that pushed her single to No. 1 and her album to platinum status in the United States, where such levels of success are expected to be met with dutiful compliance, especially if the pop star in question is a young woman. The week after O’Connor’s “S.N.L.” appearance, Joe Pesci went on the show and fantasized about slapping her. The crowd cheered.